BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | I walked into October 12-15’s New York Comic Con with a simple goal: Buy a comic book. Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comic book writers, had died earlier that week, and I wanted to find an issue of his Justice League from the “Bwah Ha Ha!” era in the late […]
BY EILEEN STUKANE | On the stage where I Need That is in performance, the curtain, playing the part of a canvas, offers a painted aerial view of streets and houses—a grid of suburbia in Anywhere, USA. My Playbill is even more specific: “Place: New Jersey” and “Time: Now.” Spilling from beneath the curtain and […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | The Jewish Comics Experience (or “JewCE”) was announced before October 7, although the timing of the event is perfectly in tune with November 2023’s zeitgeist. The Golden Age superheroes like Superman, Captain America, and Batman were all created by Jews in the late 1930s. This is neither a coincidence, nor revisionist […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | A Holocaust musical by Barry Manilow? Relax, it’s actually good. Harmony has been gestating since 1997, when it premiered in San Diego, and now—after playing the Museum of Jewish Heritage last year—it’s finally arrived on Broadway. With music by long-running pop star Manilow and book/lyrics by Bruce Sussman, who’s written film […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Ah, New York City—where our early evening weeknight events sparkle, shine, snap, and clap louder than most other places can manage at Saturday night’s apex. Icons and legends abound at 7pm on Tuesday, November 7, when NYC’s storied Strand Book Store gives its 3rd floor Rare Book Room over to something […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | October is, in its way, our most colorful month, and a reprise of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Curriculum II—a rich stew of language, idea, movement phrases, and buckets of bright paint applied to the bodies of 10 gorgeous, diverse dancers—seems a good way of welcoming it to town. From its […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | Spooky Season in New York is off to an early start this year. An interactive haunted house has been running just off Times Square since a week before Fall officially began. The premise of Terror Vision is that the audience members are visiting HorrorWood Studios. They are guests of a film […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER (For Part I of Zimmer’s fall dance column, click here.) Bijayini Satpathy: ABHIPSAA — a seeking | Conceived and developed during the pandemic, this new work in the Odissi tradition had its first performances at Duke University in 2021, and makes its New York premiere in Chelsea, at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Dancer-choreographer […]
BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | There’s been a sea-change in our dance and performance art communities. Building since before the pandemic, it is now firmly entrenched. The first inkling of the shift came years ago, when the proportion of Bessies (New York Dance and Performance Awards) won by BIPOC artists began to rise dramatically. On August […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Spoiler alert! Yes, the car flies! And it does so much more dexterously than in the lame 2005 Broadway adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In fact, the car is a DeLorean that lights up, turns, zooms, spins, and eventually levitates over the orchestra seats, then turns upside down. With people […]